from the xkcd-becomes-real-life dept

We've seen a lot of silliness this political season, most of which I happily lay the blame for at the feet of what has to be the lamest group of candidates for President this esteemed country has ever seen. What these good-for-nothings have bred is a deeper level of hateful rhetoric and toxic partisanship than what was present already, which I didn't even think was possible. Yet they achieved it anyway, meaning that my social media feeds are overflowing with the kind of know-nothing memes and claims about all of the candidates that have me thinking about downing a bottle of rat poison just to make my brain stop hurting. Add to all of it the involvement of SuperPACs for all of these candidates, with their un-subtle messages and self-serving advertising, and it's enough to wonder if we should scrap this whole America thing and try to start something new from scratch.

Citing “lessons learned from online engagement with ‘Bernie Bros,’” a pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC is pledging to spend $1 million to “push back against” users on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram. Correct the Record’s “Barrier Breakers” project boasts in a press release that it has already “addressed more than 5,000 people that have personally attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter.” The PAC released this on Thursday.

I'll get the obligatory XKCD out of the way, because there was simply no way not to include this comic in this post.

So, yeah, this Hillary PAC is spending a million dollars to apparently argue with people on social media, which is the kind of thing some of us do for free every day, because we're obsessive jack-wagons unable to let anyone anywhere say something stupid and think they got away with it. But I know that I'm almost certainly wasting my time, whereas this superPAC is boasting about all of this.

But why is it a time-waster? Well, because the kind of people saying the kinds of messages about Hillary Clinton that this campaign is likely to try to rebut aren't going to be swayed by paid web-trollers and their arguments, factual or otherwise.

“This explains why my inbox turned to cancer on Tuesday,” wrote user OKarizee. “Been a member of reddit for almost 4 years and never experienced anything like it. In fact, in all my years on the internet I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

So the targeted rebuttal is deemed to be "cancer." Victory?

More interesting is that the PAC in question, Correct the Record, claims it is coordinating directly with the Clinton campaign in doing all of this. And it claims that this is all perfectly legal, despite the infamous Citizens United ruling resting on the claim that PACs are private interests and do not coordinate with the campaigns of politicians. What logic is Correct the Record relying on in claiming that its coordinating is legal? Well, these rebuttals aren't paid spots, so campaign finance rules don't apply.

Due to FEC loopholes, the Sunlight Foundation’s Libby Watson found this year that Correct the Record can openly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign, despite rules that typically disallow political campaigns from working directly with PACs.

“SuperPACs aren’t supposed to coordinate with candidates. The whole reasoning behind (Supreme Court decision) Citizens United rests on (PACs) being independent, but Correct the Record claims it can coordinate,” Watson told The Daily Beast. “It’s not totally clear what their reasoning is, but it seems to be that material posted on the Internet for free—like, blogs—doesn’t count as an ‘independent expenditure.’ Usually places like MMFA and CTR are defending her against the media and established figures. This seems to be going after essentially random individuals online,” she said. “I don’t know that they’ve done anything like this before.”

It's an interesting argument by the PAC, but one that reportedly is raising eyebrows among lawyers involved in campaign finance law. Some are claiming that this tactic is a cynical undermining of the spirit of campaign finance laws, using a loophole to get around the laws' original purpose. There are also claims floating around that the Federal Election Commission should do something about this, but isn't over a lack of understanding of whether any of this is legal.

Which ultimately may not matter all that much because, as I noted above, I just can't see how this is a productive use of this PACs time and resources. I argue with people online all the time, because I'm an idiot, and rarely do those arguments end with minds changed. And those arguments are often on topics far less divisive than American politics. Why should this PAC think any of this will turn out any better for them?

from the things-change dept

I first signed up for Twitter in March of 2007, but I'll admit that I barely used it for about nine months. There were two events in early 2008, however, that convinced me of Twitter's power. The first was that I logged in and saw someone who I only knew online, but not in person, mention a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in NY that I really liked, and because of that, we actually arranged to meet up there for lunch a few weeks later when I was in NY. That ability to connect people was really powerful. The second, though, was much bigger, and it was the Iowa caucus in 2008. It was in January in 2008, but I'm thinking about it today, obviously because (in case you haven't heard), today is this year's Iowa caucus that officially kicks off the Presidential silly season, known as the Presidential nominating process.

As the caucuses ramped up in that evening in 2008, something kind of fascinating happened. I saw someone (again, someone I knew via Twitter, but not in real life), retweet an account that someone had set up solely to retweet in person tweets from within the various caucuses. I quickly followed that account (which I long ago unfollowed, so I don't even remember the account name or even if it still exists). And it kept popping up first person real life reports of what was happening with the various caucus gatherings. And then I started following some of the mainstream news coverage of the caucus as well. To be honest, I didn't really care that much about what happened in Iowa, but the tweets from inside caucus gatherings seemed... unique. It made it more real and more personal.

And here was the real kicker: almost every retweet showed Barack Obama beating Hillary Clinton and John Edwards (the two other "leading" candidates) sometimes by a large margin. And yet every single mainstream news report claimed that based on their "exit polls" or whatever the hell they were doing, all three candidates were stuck in a statistical dead heat 33/33/33. But as the evening wore on, and more and more of the Twitter reports showed Obama winning caucus gather after caucus gathering, the mainstream media reports finally started showing some separating between the candidates, with Obama finally winning with over 37% of the vote (Clinton and Edwards each had about 29+).

Of course, in the eight years since, Twitter has grown and changed and struggled. And I doubt I'll have the same experience tonight. Already (unlike eight years ago), the press is pushing out lists of people to follow on Twitter to "get the full story" on the Iowa caucuses, and the list is mainly made up of professional journalists. And, at the same time, the company continues to try to reinvent itself to make itself more acceptable to Wall Street investors. The company stupidly shunned the developers and contributors who made the service so powerful in the early years, meaning that it's getting increasingly frustrating to actually use Twitter. It's been adding in "features" that the company thinks will benefit advertisers, but seem to negatively impact its best users. And there are all sorts of questions about how Twitter will survive (though it has a ton of cash on hand).

For a long time I've argued that Twitter made a big mistake in focusing on being a platform instead of a protocol, and the struggles it's facing today are just some evidence supporting that concern. As a "platform" they're so focused on building the business, rather than being useful. And in scaring off or simply blocking or killing their developer community, the fact that the service has gotten more annoying than useful lately, is a real loss. If there were a thriving developer community there would be ample opportunities for those innovations to make the service better. But instead, it's been left to Twitter alone, and the company is failing (badly) in that role.

Eight years ago I saw the power of Twitter. And today, I'm really missing that unique power. I hope it can return soon.

from the 'murica dept

Politics can be tricky territory for companies and brands to wade through. While some corporations have made notorious claims on political matters, and occasionally even get behind candidates, the vast majority of companies know that they're better off endorsing nobody and nothing. As Michael Jordan once famously put it when he'd been urged by a Democratic campaign to be more politically active: "Republicans buy sneakers, too."

That's what makes the reaction of America's Best, the eyeglass and contact-lens company, to Scott Walker using a logo for his campaign that is nearly identical to the company's so special. They didn't lose their minds. They didn't go trademark ballistic. They just had some fun with it.

Both Walker's campaign and America's Best Contacts and Eyeglasses feature a cartoonish, four-part American flag logo as the "E" in their names. The same flag icon is also their stand-alone logos when the text is removed.

In a brief phone call on Monday, America's Best CEO Reade Fahs told Business Insider that his company wasn't taking sides in the presidential race. But he said he appreciates the Walker campaign approving of the design.

"We don't endorse presidential candidates, but we sure love it when they endorse us," he quipped.

Here are the logos, Walker's first and America's Best second.

So, yeah, they're the same. And it could have been very easy for the company at that point to completely flip out in anger, or to rush to assure everyone that it hadn't endorsed any political candidate for any political office. Instead, the CEO's calm and measured response was endearing. Not to mention the company's response on social media.

And they go on and on like that on Twitter, making sure everyone knows the company isn't endorsing anyone, but likewise insisting the company isn't going to go legal on Walker's logo. In the meantime, rather than coming off like some kind of petty and frightened corporation by flipping out, America's Best engenders a fun, laid back, hip sensibility. You know, good public relations, which has us talking about how cool a move it is rather than having some legal filing buried in the news that nobody cares about. Well done all around.

from the who-needs-lobbying? dept

Earlier this year, there was a lot of hype and uproar about the revelation that, back in 2012, Facebook had run an experiment on news feeds to see if it could make people happy or sad. While I really don't think the experiment was so crazy, others disagreed. Of course, that was hardly the only experiment that Facebook has run on its users, and over at Mother Jones, Micah Sifry last week revealed the details of another Facebook newsfeed experiment from 2012: one that influenced how and if people voted:

For one such experiment, conducted in the three months prior to Election Day in 2012, Facebook increased the amount of hard news stories at the top of the feeds of 1.9 million users. According to one Facebook data scientist, that change—which users were not alerted to—measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout.

As the article notes, Facebook had experimented with "I'm Voting" or "I'm a Voter" buttons on its site to see if that would encourage friends to vote, but its civic engagement tactics have gone much further than that. Still, even all the way back in 2010, Facebook had realized that just using those "voter" buttons likely increased voting:

After the election, the study's authors examined voter records and concluded that Facebook's nudging had increased voter turnout by at least 340,000. As the study noted, that's about 0.14 percent of the total voting-age population in 2010. Considering that overall turnout rose from 37.2 percent in 2006 to 37.8 percent in 2010—both off-year, nonpresidential elections—the Facebook scientists maintained that the voter megaphone impact in 2010 was substantial. "It is possible," the Facebook team wrote in Nature, "that more of the 0.6 percent growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook."

Now, for the 2012 experiment, which Facebook doesn't seem to want to talk about very much (and, in fact, it pulled a video about it, after Sifry started poking around, asking questions):

In the fall of 2012, according to two public talks given by Facebook data scientist Lada Adamic, a colleague at the company, Solomon Messing, experimented on the news feeds of 1.9 million random users. According to Adamic, Messing "tweaked" the feeds of those users so that "instead of seeing your regular news feed, if any of your friends had shared a news story, [Messing] would boost that news story so that it was up top [on your page] and you were much more likely to see it." Normally, most users will see something more personal at the top of the page, like a wedding announcement or baby pictures.

Messing's "tweak" had an effect, most strongly among occasional Facebook users. After the election, he surveyed that group and found a statistically significant increase in how much attention users said they paid to government. And, as the below chart used by Adamic in a lecture last year suggests, turnout among that group rose from a self-reported 64 percent to more than 67 percent. This means Messing's unseen intervention boosted voter turnout by 3 percent. That's a major uptick (though based only on user self-reporting).

There were also other experiments to see what types of messages (i.e., "I'm a Voter" vs. "I'm Voting") were more effective.

I'm sure that these kinds of efforts will concern some -- and there are already some people talking about "manipulating the election," but to some extent that's silly. The same is true of just about any political campaigning or "get out the vote" effort. Could there be some concern that Facebook has disproportionate power or (as the article suggests) really only helps one party (more Facebook users are Democrats)? Perhaps, but that's the nature of a (mostly) free and open society where we have democratic elections. Some percentage of the public votes, and lots of people are pushing to either get them to vote or to vote in certain ways. Facebook being a part of that seems interesting to note and to follow, but it's not necessarily a problem or something to be concerned about.

from the screaming-U-turn dept

A Liberal National government in Australia would adopt the opt-out UK approach to filtering the internet for all Australians.

The policy comes less than 41 hours before polls open for voting in the federal election where the Coalition is currently expected to win. It is also almost a year after the Labor government abandoned its plans for mandatory internet filtering, and three years after the Coalition announced that it would not support a policy for mandatory internet filtering.

As that notes, the current Australian government dropped plans for mandatory censorship, after many years of trying to bring it in. This makes the Coalition's unexpected decision to add it without any public consultation deeply disappointing. Although the justification for this move is the tried-and-tested "for the children" argument, it seems to have been a last-minute decision. That's suggested by the lack of information on how exactly the system would work:

much of the detail was still yet to be worked out on how the filter would work, but would likely be hardware included on an internet connection in each user's home.

That doesn't really make any sense. Does that mean that everyone would be forced to install such filters, and then opt out from using them -- which seems an unfair extra imposition and expense for those who don't want to be censored? Will the hardware filters contain the blocking lists? If they don't, and they draw on server-side lists to function, would removing the filters allow anyone to circumvent the blocks? If they do hold the lists, how will those be updated, and what happens when that process goes wrong, as it inevitably will?

As well as the rather underhand way that this major shift has been introduced, another troubling aspect is the fact that the document "The Coalition's Policy To Enhance Online Safety for Children" (pdf) cites the UK's censorship plans, which are highly controversial and still under discussion, as if they were done and dusted:

As has recently been achieved in the UK, we expect these standards will involve the major internet service providers providing home network filters for all new home broadband services, which will be switched on as the default unless the customer specifies otherwise.

The Coalition has never supported mandatory internet filtering. Indeed, we have a long record of opposing it.

The policy which was issued today was poorly worded and incorrectly indicated that the Coalition supported an "opt out" system of internet filtering for both mobile and fixed line services. That is not our policy and never has been.

The correct position is that the Coalition will encourage mobile phone and internet service providers to make available software which parents can choose to install on their own devices to protect their children from inappropriate material.

The policy posted online today is being replaced with the correct version.

Note there that the mysterious "hardware filters" have morphed into the very different "software". Of course, this screaming U-turn inevitably raises the question whether the policy might magically return if the Coalition does indeed win this weekend's election. This episode also shows once more how bad Internet policy ideas tend to spread rapidly among politicians, and why therefore they need to be fought vigorously when they first appear.

from the get-'em-while-they're-young dept

We've covered mishaps with regard to e-voting in elections for quite a while now, but you may have noticed that these stories tend to revolve around the big leagues of politics. E-votes to hotmail accounts in national elections, experimental patches being applied to voting machines in Ohio, and Irish voting machines so horrifically flawed that they ended up being sold for less money than required to buy a pint of Guinness are all to do with, shall we say, professional politicians. And just as with the sporting world, the college ranks of amateur politicos are left untainted by this sort of malfunction, drama, and cheating.

Actually, just like in the sporting world, the college ranks can be every bit as dirty, as shown by the story of how one former college student will get jail-time for rigging his school's elections for President of student government.

Matthew Weaver, 22, of Huntington Beach, Calif., stole almost 750 students' identities to try and become president of the San Diego County college's student government. His plan went awry when the school's computer technicians noticed an anomaly in activity and caught Weaver with keystroke loggers as he sat in front of the suspicious computer.

Yes, the aspiring politician did what we all kind of assume professional politicians do: played dirty. In what was apparently a months-long plot to get something like $30k in stipends, Weaver bought keylogging software and installed it on university computers to get student credentials and vote for himself. His plan was to win Student President and then appoint a bunch of his frat brothers into roles to keep the stipends rolling in. You know, like pretty much all politicians do. And, to keep the parallel going, Weaver made matters worse by trying to cover up his fraudulent behavior by creating fake Facebook accounts for his stolen identities and then make it look like they were all supporting his campaign and alluding to a frame-job when the university began its investigation.

"He's on fire for this crime, and then he pours gasoline on it to try to cover it up," the judge reportedly said during Monday's sentencing hearing.

When that bit of trickery failed, Weaver, as pro-politicians eventually do, admitted his guilt in court, got a year in prison, and the elections were voided and will be reheld. In the meantime, SDC College will be without anyone in its senior student political office, just for a bit of fraud and asshattery. I can only assume that after he's released from jail, he'll announce his candidacy for Governor of Illinois.

from the a-lot dept

A year ago, we wrote about a fantastic episode of the radio program This American Life, which was all about lobbying. One part of it revealed just how much time our elected officials in Congress spend fundraising, and the numbers were somewhat astounding. Both major political parties have set up phone banks across the street from the Capitol (because it's seen as demeaning to do the calls directly from your Congressional office) and members of the House and the Senate spend a ridiculous amount of time there. The report suggested multiple hours each day on average, just focused on raising money for their re-election campaign. It's really quite incredible.

House members, on average, each raised $1,689,580, an average of $2,315 every day during the 2012 cycle.

Senators, on average, each raised $10,476,451, an average of $14,351 every day during the 2012 cycle.

No wonder they're hitting the phones every day. Of course, since these are averages, and averages can be skewed, it might help to dig in a bit, and thankfully, MapLight has supplied all the data in a handy dandy spreadsheet.

Digging a bit deeper, we see that the campaign that got the highest amount of money is (no surprise) Elizabeth Warren's Senate campaign, which raised $42,506,349. That's a real outlier, as the second highest amount was less than half of that (Sherrod Brown, who raised $20,945,196). The lowest amount for a Senate campaign? Angus King, the Independent from Maine who raised just $2,964,323 -- though he's beloved in Maine and most people thought he had the campaign locked up from the beginning (which is a good thing, since we need more non-partisans in Congress, and King seems to be quite good). There were a few other campaigns around $3 million as well. At the very least, the data suggests that $3 million is the basic entry fee. The median for Senate campaigns pops out at $9,341,391 -- not far off from the mean. That median campaign was Dean Hellers.

On the House side, there were a few clear outliers, topped by Michele Bachmann's $25,894,721 -- though I assume much of that was raised back when she was running for President -- so not particularly representative. The other outlier on the high end: Speaker of the House John Boehner's $22,024,288. No one else came even remotely close. Third place was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor who took in $7,640,467. Note that Bachmann and Boehner actually raised more than any victorious Senate campaign, other than Warren's. The lowest amount raised? That would be Eni Faleomavaega (who?) who raised just $110,570. Of course, he's a non-voting "delegate" to the House, representing American Samoa's at-large district. Similarly, another non-voting delegate, Gregorio Sablan (from the Northern Mariana Islands) raised just $111,145. The lowest amount raised by a winning voting House member would be the $212,068 raised by Jose Serrano. The median amount in the House (including the non-voting members...) is $1,350,902 (for Rep. Janice Schakowsky). That's just a bit lower than the mean, which is probably the impact of the two massive outliers on the high end.

Of course, this data only looks at the winners, not the losers, and you could make a case that that data is pretty relevant as well. Still, the data makes it clear that successfully running for office requires a lot of money, which is why our politicians spend so much time fundraising. If all that fundraising kept them away from making bad laws, perhaps it would be a good thing, but, of course, part of the problem is that implicit in at least some of the fundraising effort is that these politicians will scratch the back of the donors -- which is how we end up in a world where so many politicians seem to focus on crony capitalism and rewarding those who fund their campaign, over what may be best for their actual constituents.

from the small-sample-sizes dept

Many people seem to assume that any internet-based poll is, inherently, unreliable as compared to other polling methods. However, Nate Silver has taken a look at how a variety of polls fared in the 2012 Presidential election and found that many of the internet polls did quite well, outperforming other methods:

...some of the most accurate firms were those that conducted their polls online.

The final poll conducted by Google Consumer Surveys had Mr. Obama ahead in the national popular vote by 2.3 percentage points – very close to his actual margin, which was 2.6 percentage points based on ballots counted through Saturday morning.

Ipsos, which conducted online polls for Reuters, came close to the actual results in most places that it surveyed, as did the Canadian online polling firm Angus Reid. Another online polling firm, YouGov, got reasonably good results.

This isn't to say (of course) that online polling is always accurate. It still very much depends on methodology (some online polls didn't do very well at all). But, it should put to rest the idea that online polling is inherently flawed or inaccurate.

from the vanquished dept

Last month, we were among those who reported on an absolutely bizarre strategy by a candidate for the Maine state Senate to demonize his opponent, Colleen Lachowicz, by highlighting her enjoyment of World of Warcraft and then taking some of her statements about the game completely out of context, to imply they were political statements that had relevance beyond inside the game. Even after this was widely mocked, the folks behind the mailer defended it.

In the end, it appears that this was not an effective campaign strategy. As highlighted by Slashdot, Lachowicz won her campaign and was elected. The article notes that the attention from the bizarre attacks resulted in support from "gamers from around the world," who helped raise an additional $6,300 in contributions for her campaign. Not knowing when to back down and go away, her opponents claimed that the money raised was done so illegally, though an ethics board cleared her of any wrongdoing.

Perhaps, next time, politicians will recognize that mocking a candidate for doing something millions of people enjoy is not a particularly smart campaign strategy.